First, I apologise if this review comes across as overly pretentious. I assure you, it is an authentic account of my reaction to the concert and not some NME gonzo bullshit. I tried to find Shut on the internet to share some, but I couldn't find any so if you want to hear for yourself you'll just have to watch out for their next show.
EDIT Matthew from the band has thanked me for the review, and asked me to share his bands website, which is this: http://shutband.wordpress.com/
/EDIT
I am not normally too keen on post-rock. It's my understanding that it is to all the indie-pop and Arctic Monkey clones (a movement sometimes collectively styled "post-punk revival") what progressive music was to punk. When the music the kids in bands are playing tends towards being more accessible, catchier, and arguably less ambitious, some of their more thoughtful peers perhaps start to see something wrong with it. They worry that the accessibility may be cover for a troubling hollowness to the songs. The songs have lyrics, melody, rhythm and delivery that feel like they are just playing the part. It seems inauthentic. To me post-rock feels like an attempt to regain authenticity, and while I think it is an attempt that fails, (being post-anything almost certainly dooms you to the pitfalls of self-referentiality and the cannibalisation of culture) when it is done well it fails beautifully, and has a lot to communicate on many levels.
Last night I saw the York band Shut perform for the first time. I had seen a few post-rock bands before but for whatever reason this was something different. Firstly there was the context. I was slightly intoxicated from a Martini I had from a well-known cocktail bar in York before hand. I was exhausted, it being the day after a three day long camping and rock climbing adventure at Brimham Rocks. Furthermore, I was with some people I had not seen properly for a while, and who gave me a lot to think about. They played a full forty minute set with no pauses.
Their set began in much the way one might expect. The frontman was playing his electric bass guitar with a bow, the drummer was hitting the cymbals gently with a set of small bells, a guitarist with his back to me was doing something I didn't understand and the fourth band member had a little object in his hand and was using it to make noises. Steven Jeffels, the drummer, had spoken to me a little beforehand and described what they were going to play as "monolithic and spiritual" which for me summed up this first segment.
The real treasure for me though was about half way through the set, when a simple, little catchy hook came in. Only four or five notes, it seemed fragile amongst the noise before and around it. It kept on though, and for a while the music was set around it. Then this hook was assaulted by an onslaught from the drums, the bass, the second guitarist. They screamed at it, it was like they were trying to destroy it. It made me think of our best laid plans, which seem so important at the time. Like that hook, we construct them somewhere early on, and then they are attacked by all of life's circumstances, the demands and pressures of relationships, work, duty, pride, whatever. In the face of these pressures our tiny, human, naïve plans somehow persist. The attack ceased, and the hook remained.
It felt different now, though. After the barrage it didn't sound the same anymore. To my ear it became more jaded, cynical, perhaps, a musical element or a best made plan conscious of its own futility. The rest of the music reflected that. It was playful, but not innocently so, cruelly so. The self-mockery built up and intensified, until it became a different kind of destructive noise, this time of its own making. I felt like they were trying to communicate the forces of self destruction that are in all of us and which are activated when we glean the laughability of our own fragile existence. Even this though, even this self destructive movement, the hook survived. It persisted alone again as the storm subsided, and I felt I knew why.
It was because in the face of all these troubles, our plans, as small as we are, are all we have. The music told me: it may be small, and silly, and constantly threatened by forces within and without, but these little things are all we have. And then something else happened. The second guitar played a hook of its own. Different, but in harmony. Even though I try and fail and my hopes are in all the wrong places and the fulfillment of my desires will never satisfy me, we are all the same. Everyone's playing their own little hook, and all we can do is keep going in the face of the massiveness of life and the universe and everything. The music revolved around this in a rare moment of order and relative simplicity, and the movement ended, and we went somewhere else.
After being dragged through that emotionally, I felt haggard. It was intensified by the pathetic fallacy of all of the friends I had been there with leaving in ones and threes, giving more emotional weight to the themes the band and I were exploring. I looked around at the faces in the audience, were they thinking about what to have for lunch tomorrow? I looked at the band, and I knew they weren't feeling what I was feeling. And that fact made its own point.
Music like that, with no words, but with obvious weight, communicates but more than other music it gives everyone something different. Both the intellectual backdrop and that particular event are quite honest in that fact. It said something to me, not just about the incommunicability of the musical experience, but about the incommunicability of life itself. In several important ways, I am alone: I will never really understand how someone else feels nor they me. But that is the same for all of us, and for some reason, that can be a comforting thought.
The chaos that followed, the frenetic and passion filled finale, delivered its own insights but nothing rivaled that middle section for me. The show as a whole made some important points to me, and one which has stayed with me particularly was about the imperfection of our lives. It's dirty, and broken, and chaotic, it often seems meaningless. It's lonely, it's confusing, it's for many people often boring. But it's all we've got. And maybe, just maybe, it's enough.
